In The Usual Suspects (1995), Verbal Kint (played by Kevin Spacey) utters a version of Charles Baudelaire's often quoted line: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing man that he didn't exist.” Verbal, as anyone who has watched the movie knows, is the proverbial devil is disguise. His greatest trick is being the villain right under our noses. Verbal, this particular devil, works because the other suspects doubt yet fear his existence. W. Scott Poole's Satan in America, however, offers a different take in which Satan abounds in American culture, lurks around corners, appears in different guises, and proves to be an object of American fascination and consumption. Satan and Satanism become the venues for Americans “to express their anxieties about the nature of evil” (x). Americans watch television shows like Dexter, in which a serial killer is the protagonist; read pulp fiction and true crime novels; and follow documentaries on gangs and serial killers on various cable outlets. We consume these horrors, according to Poole, because we hope that we might glance at evil and somehow avoid it in our everyday lives. Evil, unfortunately, is commonplace and banal.

What Poole does quite convincingly is demonstrate how Americans have placed our evil, individual and collective impulses, on the Prince of Darkness. The devil is a prominent part of the American religious history and popular culture as a method to render national and personal enemies as fundamentally evil. For Poole, this “social history of Satan has been one in which the devil has been used to ‘characterize human enemies’. . . . [and] has been linked with the perceived threats to our national order and national identity” (xix). Evil becomes a necessity in the defense of American innocence. This desire for American purity means that examinations of American prescriptions of the devil illuminates the stark divide between American visions of an innocent nation-state and the historical reality of America's failures to maintain that vision. Satan is not a devil in disguise because cultural and political demonology and intolerance are foundational to the American nation in Poole's accounting.

To provide the “social history” of Satan, Poole divides his work into two halves, “Diabolical Beginnings,” which catalogues how the American Satan emerged out of religious, particularly Reformation, origins, and “The Satanic Century,” which interrogates the fascination with the devil in the twentieth century. Satan arrived in the early colonies as a threat from witchcraft to indigenous inhabitants. Colonists believed in the Jersey Devil and that British oppressors clearly had a pact with the demonic. In the eighteenth century, American Christianity crafted and embraced concepts of spiritual warfare through revivals in which all Christians were locked in a battle between Satan and God. Satan, however, did not play fair and his role grew as a key actor in apocalyptic scenarios. More importantly, Poole deftly shows how Satan evolved from the Puritans to evangelicals: the devil became as personal in his approach as the Savior. Poole writes, “For the Puritans, the appearance of the devil itself signaled that one's soul had been irretrievably lost. But by the early nineteenth century, a vision of the devil meant that you had began a struggle that would ultimately save your soul” (43). With a more personal darkness lurking nearby, warfare became acceptable in the battle for the light.

Simultaneously, Satan became more personal and more essential to the characterizations of the nation and its inhabitants. Satan became “a metaphor for the cultural Other,” which “might seem like a devil bled of his theological power, shorthand for the social ills of American civilization” (67). Yet Poole argues that the personal devil and the national reliance on Satan showcase how Satan emerged as a fixture not only of American Christian circles but also in political and ideological spaces. Diabolical narratives characterized reform campaigns, missionary endeavors, and discussions of lynching. By the twentieth century, evil “legitimized its own worst tendencies” (88). America's large providential destiny obscured national failings and tragedies, and the expansion of national power and claims of national innocence meant that the twentieth century, the American century, was also the “satanic century” (89).

This satanic century marked the turn of Satan from religious culture to a new career in American popular culture. Robert Johnson made a deal with a devil at crossroads, and, for Poole, America is still standing at this space without recognizing it. The devil was not lurking but rather he became part and parcel of “America's own soul.” Most “saw him in America's cultural enemies” (131). Satanic panics, Hollywood films, Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communism campaign, heavy metal, Left Behind, and Stephen King all presented visions of America's Satan. Satan emerged as a celebrity much like Stephen Prothero's American Jesus (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003). This American conception of evil called upon Satan in times when the nation needed a “suspension of moral scruples” (207). World politics and religious clashes materialize as simplified struggles between good and evil, and the American nation appears only on the side of innocence and righteousness. The cultural history of Satan illuminates how “Satan provided America a metaphor for what our culture hates and fears most at each moment in our history” (213). The narratives of evil and the devil reveal the larger history of spiritual warfare, misogyny, racism, and imperialism while allowing Americans to be innocent from our larger, darker past.

Poole's history of Satan is the darker side to Prothero's culture mapping of Jesus. By reading the two works together, Jesus and Satan become the interlocutors for American Christianity, and the devil of the details, Poole's Satan, illuminates the seamier side of American Christianities in the dedication to spiritual warfare, the presentation of moral panic, and the characterization of cultural Others as satanic. “The devil's greatest trick is . . . to convince us that he lives in our enemies, that he surrounds us, and he must be destroyed, no matter the cost” (216). The destruction of enemies as the destruction of Satan masks the perpetuation of evil in American history. Under the banner of rooting out the devil, Americans can claim virtue and innocence while promoting and creating the violence and evil they seek to destroy. By labeling enemies as satanic, Americans have preserved the legacy and destiny of the nation, but Poole aptly shows “there is a devil . . . in our collective history at the intersection of violence and hubris,” and it is finally time to cast him out (216).